one product from last night's class

I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to have students write in response to Steedman's work in order to acknowledge the pleasure of her text. Here's what I wrote:

"I think I would be a very different person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn't told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something" (122).

"We carry moments like this through a lifetime; things were wrong; there was a dislocation between me and the world" (51).

"I always forget, always have to deliberately call to mind the fact that my father retaliated, shouted back..." (50).

The things that just don't come naturally, the things we have to force ourselves to remember. When I was a child, I surely had needs and those needs were surely responded to, which means in some small way that I was worth something. Before I went to school and was encouraged and rewarded on a relatively regular basis, though, I developed a psychic structure that remains with me to this day: any kind gesture, any kind word, any kind of evidence that I have a right to exist, that I'm worth something, has to be digested slowly, turned over and over again in my mind until it can somehow be, if not integrated, then at least accepted for now.

Get over the past. Change your structures of feeling. Change your responses to stimuli. Make new choices. Banish the voices in your head that tell you you're not worth anything. Do all this and then you'll be a good mother. Do all this and then you'll change your mind about parenting.